Journal articles on the topic 'Mixer wagon'

The adoption of the mixer wagon and total mixed ration aimed to decrease dysmetabolic diseases and improve feed efficiency in dairy cows. Differences between theoretical and eaten diets are imputable to errors in diet preparation or cow feed sorting. We proposed a method to measure the chemical composition and particle size distribution of the ration and determined its peNDF content through a portable Near Infra-Red spectrophotometer that allowed the calculation of two indexes: the homogeneity and the sorting indexes. In a cohort of 19 Italian Holstein breeding farms, we studied the correlation of these indexes with the mixer wagon settings. Determination coefficients in the validation (Rv2) for dry matter, crude protein, aNDF, and starch were 0.91, 0.54, 0.86, and 0.67, respectively. The ration fractions (%, w/w of wet weight) retained by the 3.8 and 1.8 mm sieves, and the bottom showed Rv2 of 0.46, 0.49, and 0.53, respectively. The homogeneity index regressed negatively with the mixer wagon load fullness (R2 = 0.374). The homogeneity-binary classification showed an odds ratio of 1.72 for dry matter and 0.39 for aNDF (p < 0.05). The sorting-binary classification showed an odds ratio of 2.54 for aNDF (p < 0.05). The studied farms showed low peNDF values (median = 17.9%).

Recent research in Australia has measured the marginal milk production responses of cows grazing perennial-based pastures to supplements offered as a partial mixed ration (PMR). In the present study, the milk responses to PMR feeding developed under a restricted pasture allowance were used to examine the contribution to farm profit of decisions about short-term feeding (weekly, monthly). A short-term, or tactical, decision was considered to be one where the infrastructure and equipment needed to mix and feed out a formulated ration were already available. The decision was, therefore, the choice of whether to feed supplements as grain in the dairy at milking and forage in the paddock, or to feed the supplements as a mixed ration on a feed pad. Both of these options were assumed to exist for the farmer decision-maker, with the comparison of rations being based solely on the costs of supplement and milk income. The Control diet in the experiments comprised cereal grain fed in the dairy and pasture silage fed in the paddock, simulating a situation where pasture available for grazing was limiting. The PMR diet consisted of cereal grain, maize grain, maize silage and lucerne hay combined in a mixer wagon and fed on a feed pad. The PMR + canola diet was similar to the PMR diet, but included canola meal. The profitability of the diets for different amounts of supplement intake was compared by estimating the total income from milk produced minus the cost of the supplements. The results indicated that feeding the diet comprising PMR plus canola meal in early lactation contributed more to farm profit than did the Control diet of feeding grain in the dairy and forage in the paddock, or PMR feeding without canola meal, because of higher milk production. At a supplement intake of 12 kg DM/cow.day, the PMR + canola diet added AU$0.97/cow.day and AU$2.11/cow.day more to profit than the Control and PMR without canola meal diets, respectively. For a farm already equipped with a feed pad and mixer wagon, the benefits of feeding a mixed ration exceed the costs in early lactation. In late lactation, each diet made similar contributions to farm profit because of similar milk production.

In a previous experiment, with different types of straw and different levels of concentrates in mixed diets, it was demonstrated that steers could achieve growth rates in excess of 1.2 kg/day using diets containing up to 0.45 straw, Kay et al (1988). Few farms are equipped for complete diet feeding and so an experiment was set up to ascertain whether similar performances could be achieved when feeding loose-mix concentrates with long straw.Thirty-six Hereford x Friesian heifers of 350 kg initial mean liveweight were allocated to one of four diets. The diets contained ammonia treated or untreated straw of the spring barley variety Doublet and were offered in either a complete mixed form containing 0.45 straw, or as long straw and concentrates fed separately with the concentrate mix consisting of barley, molassed beet pulp, fishmeal, urea, molasses and minerals. Ammonia treatment was carried out in an oven with 0.03 anhydrous ammonia for 24 hours. Complete diets were effected by processing straw through a tub grinder before transfer to a mixer wagon. Complete diets were offered ad libitum. Concentrates in the other diets were offered twice daily at a rate equivalent to that consumed by animals on the complete diets. Liveweight and feed intake data were recorded.

Results from a previous experiment with growing steers showed that straw from varieties of winter and spring barley or winter wheat supported different intakes and rates of gain. It was possible to identify those cereal straws most suitable for inclusion in low cost diets for beef cattle. The object of this work was to assess whether complete diets containing a minimum of 35% “good” straw could sustain a high rate of gain in finishing cattle. The trial used 45 Hereford cross steers that weighed 360 kg at the start. There were three types of straw examined; straw from the spring barley variety Corgi, untreated (UC) and ammonia treated (AC) together with ammonia treated winter wheat (AW) cv. Longbow;. Each straw type was included in a complete diet containing either 0.35 (L), 0.45 (M) or 0.55 (H) straw. Ammonia treatment was carried out in an oven with 0.03 anhydrous ammonia for 24 hours. The straw was processed through a tub grinder and the chopped material was transferred to a mixer wagon for diet preparation. All the diets contained fishmeal and urea and equal proportions of rolled barley and molassed sugar beet pulp substituted for the straw. The complete diets were offered ad libitum and the steers were weighed fortnightly until they were estimated to provide carcasses in MLC fat class 4L. Digestibility data for each diet was derived in a subsidary trial using cattle fed ad libitum. The digestibility coefficients for D11 were 0.67 UC; 0.68 AW; 0.69 AC and 0.66 H; 0.68 M; 0.70 L (S.E.D. ± 0.66).

Aim A dairy farm in south-west Victoria was analysed to discern the impact on profit and risk of changing from a feeding system in the base case where grain was fed in the dairy and forage in the paddock, to a partial mixed ration (PMR) or a formulated grain mix (FGM) feeding system. Context A PMR feeding system involves feeding a well formulated mixed ration to a grazing dairy herd and typically requires the use of specialised machinery to mix and feed out the forage and grain components of the ration together onto a feed pad. In a FGM feeding system, the same formulated ration fed in the PMR system is used, but the grain component of the ration is fed using the existing feeding system in the dairy with the hay component fed in the paddock. Method The analysis used data from experiments recently performed to establish milk responses to mixed ration feeding under Australian conditions. The case study farm comprised 244 ha and a herd of 420 self-replacing Holstein-Friesian cows that calved from May to July. The herd feeding system was based on grazed pasture, grain fed in the dairy at milking and hay fed in the paddock. Supplementary feed comprised ~50% of metabolisable energy in the diet of the milking cows. The pre-existing feeding system was altered to incorporate either a PMR system or a FGM system. An increased herd size of an extra 100 cows, plus the PMR or FGM systems, was also tested. Key results All systems analysed were more profitable than the base case. Increasing the herd by 100 cows was the most profitable option for both the PMR and FGM systems, but intensifying the system by increasing cow numbers also had the most variability in profit. Conclusions and implications The FGM system was the most profitable system because milk production could be increased without the costs of extra labour, depreciation and repairs and maintenance associated with using a mixer wagon to feed the ration. The FGM system presents an option for farmers to expand or intensify their systems without needing to construct a feed pad or invest in extra machinery and equipment.

AbstractThis study compared the effect of feeding AmyPlus, a moist feed, as opposed to rolled wheat on the yield and composition of milk from dairy cows consuming grass silage based total mixed ration (TMR). Seventy-two Holstein-Friesian cows were distributed into AmyPlus (Treatment) and Wheat (Control) groups and loose housed on straw in an open shed. Each kg Wheat based concentrate contained 345g rolled wheat, 230g rapeseed meal, 115g sugarbeet pulp, 115g Molaferm 20, 115g soybean meal, 56g barley straw and 24g vitamin-minerals. In contrast, each kg AmyPlus based concentrate contained 501g AmyPlus (480g DM /kg), 105g rapeseed meal, 126g sugarbeet pulp, 126g Molaferm 20, 84g soybean meal, 41g barley straw and 17g vitamin-minerals. Here, AmyPlus was loaded directly into the mixer wagon to prepare fresh AmyPlus based TMR with a silage to concentrate ratio of 68:32. Each TMR was fed once daily to the corresponding group of cows also receiving 2kg of Distillers’ grains per cow in the parlour during milking. Daily milk yield and composition was recorded from November 1999 to February 2000. The overall daily Dry matter intake (DMI) of each TMR per cow remained uniform (20.19 vs 20.15 kg for Treatment and Control group respectively) across both groups. Daily milk yield and total cell counts per cow did not vary significantly (P>0.05) between groups during various months. While, milk fat and protein contents were greater in Treatment than Control group during each month, the differences were significant (P<0.05) only during November and December for fat and in January for protein. On average, the Treatment group tended to show a non-significant increase (P>0.05) in daily milk yield per cow by 0.144 kg than the Control group. The fat (46.2 vs 43.7) and protein (34.5 vs 33.5) contents in g /kg milk were also increased significantly (P<0.001) in Treatment compared with Control group. Total cell counts did not vary significantly (P>0.05) and remained within the acceptable limits. The cows consuming AmyPlus maintained their health as indicated by their intake, production, cell counts and general appearance. It would appear that AmyPlus can replace rolled wheat in TMR. However, it may be necessary to evaluate the storage, economic and environmental implications of using such moist co-products in silage based dairy rations.

The main goal of train loading optimization is the proper assignment of loading units onto the wagons, taking under consideration numerous factors like the maximum axle load restrictions, the condition of the railway infrastructure, the operating conditions, safety regulations etc. The typical expression of the problem is usually formulated under one of the two following assumptions: (a) the commodity load is predefined or (b) the number and type of wagons is fixed. The current work describes the steps that were followed and enabled the analysis, optimization and integration of the train loading plan into the information system that supports the new railway service of TRAINOSE for containers transport on the Athens - Thessaloniki line. This new service, named iCS, was launched in December 2013 and ever since operates on a daily basis. The work includes a literature review, a mention of the pragmatic aspects that influence container transport and train loading plan, the presentation of the heuristic which is implemented in the information system of iCS service, a validation process against a mixed integer optimization model and finally concludes with the proposed solution for the iCS wagon loading problem.

The main goal of train loading optimization is the proper assignment of loading units onto the wagons, taking under consideration numerous factors like the maximum axle load restrictions, the condition of the railway infrastructure, the operating conditions, safety regulations etc. The typical expression of the problem is usually formulated under one of the two following assumptions: (a) the commodity load is predefined or (b) the number and type of wagons is fixed. The current work describes the steps that were followed and enabled the analysis, optimization and integration of the train loading plan into the information system that supports the new railway service of TRAINOSE for containers transport on the Athens – Thessaloniki line. This new service, named iCS, was launched in December 2013 and ever since operates on a daily basis. The work includes a literature review, a mention of the pragmatic aspects that influence container transport and train loading plan, the presentation of the heuristic which is implemented in the information system of iCS service, a validation process against a mixed integer optimization model and finally concludes with the proposed solution for the iCS wagon loading problem.

AbstractTwenty-four Holstein Friesian cows in experiment 1 and 40 cows in experiment 2 were used over 12 weeks in continuous designs, to evaluate winter wheat as a forage for dairy cows. In experiment 1, whole-crop wheat was ensiled at 350 g dry matter (DM) per kg (EW) or harvested later and stored at 550 g DM per kg following treatment with 40 g urea per kg DM (40W). In addition to these treatments in experiment 2, whole-crop wheat of 550 g DM per kg treated with 20 g urea per kg DM (20W), and combine harvested wheat grain plus wheat straw (40: 60 ratio) treated with sodium hydroxide (SG) were also included. These whole-crop wheat forages were incorporated into the diet at a level of 400 g/kg of the forage DM in experiment 1, and 330 g/kg in experiment 2, with the remainder of the forage being grass silage. A control treatment of grass silage (GS) offered as the sole forage was also included. The forages were mixed in a mixer wagon and offered ad libitum. A fixed level of 8 kg/day of concentrates was offered in experiment 1 and 7 kg/day in experiment 2. Total DM intake was significantly greater for EW and 40W than for GS in experiment 1, but not in experiment 2. Milk yield was not significantly affected by diets (mean 28·8 kg/day in experiment 1 and 29·6 kg/day in experiment 2). Milk fat, protein and lactose contents and yields were also not significantly affected by diets. The additional total metabolizable energy (ME) intake of the whole-crop diets compared with GS was partitioned to live weight. There was no evidence of ME intakes being substantially greater than ME requirements as found in previous studies. A 5 × 5 Latin square digestibility experiment was carried out with Holstein-Friesian heifers offered the individual forages used in experiment 2. Intake was significantly greater for the urea-treated whole-crop wheat forages than for grass silage and for sodium hydroxide-treated grain and straw. The digestible organic matter in the dry matter (DOMD) of grass silage was 692 g/kg and the whole-crop wheat diets ranged from 626 g/kg for ensiled whole-crop wheat to 682 g/kg for the sodium hydroxide-treated grain plus straw (40: 60 ratio), with the DOMD of urea-treated whole-crop being intermediate. The results indicated that whole-crop wheat had higher intake characteristics than grass silage in spite of its lower digestibility.

The problem of delivering and fetching wagons at a railway station with mixed-shaped goods operation sites is considered, with a view to minimizing the running time between goods operation sites and waiting time of the locomotive in the planning period as the optimization objective. A general mathematical model for delivering and fetching wagons at a railway station with mixed-shaped goods operation sites has been formulated. The methods of judging and processing reverse of delivering and fetching wagons, dividing batches, and judging number of wagons for batch operation are provided to determine the feasibility of the solution, and an improved simulated annealing algorithm is introduced as our algorithm to the model. Finally, an experimental station is taken as an example to verify the model and algorithm. The results show that simulated annealing algorithm is relatively superior in computational efficiency and result compared with genetic algorithm and tabu search algorithm, the computing time of the algorithm provided can meet the requirements of planning shunting operations in railway station, and the model proposed is universal for other layout forms of GOSs and different operation forms.

Cows are usually fed forage or a mixed complete diet with an automatic delivery feed wagon daily. The feeding is a laborious and time consuming task, however such a load can be reduced by alternate day feeding of cows (Wallace and Parker, 1966; Owen, 1987; Leaver, 1990). Refusals may be collected when more then ten percent of fresh supply. The objective of this study was to compare daily with alternate day feeding of complete diet to dairy cows.

Cows are usually fed forage or a mixed complete diet with an automatic delivery feed wagon daily. The feeding is a laborious and time consuming task, however such a load can be reduced by alternate day feeding of cows (Wallace and Parker, 1966; Owen, 1987; Leaver, 1990). Refusals may be collected when more then ten percent of fresh supply. The objective of this study was to compare daily with alternate day feeding of complete diet to dairy cows.

HighlightsDevelopments in automatized feeding lead to farms being locked industrial production sites.LiDAR and Radar facilitate driverless feed mixers by covering navigation and safety aspects.External safety of driverless vehicles can be compensated with optical, acoustical and organizational measures.Abstract. Present automatic feeding systems (AFS) for dairy cattle are predominantly machines with additional external structures, e.g., bus bars and guide rails. In order to achieve complete automation of the feeding process, future AFS must be adaptable to different types of farm structures. Technologies such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging) enable free navigation of self-propelled feed mixer wagons and make important contributions to personal protection and collision avoidance. This enables the feed mixer to reach silo systems independently, remove feed and present it at the feed table. Using a self-propelled mixer feeder, both LiDAR and Radar are comparatively analyzed in a practical series of tests under farm conditions. Research into the legal framework and an exemplary risk assessment lay the conceptual basis for future automatic feeding systems. The aim of this consideration is to derive a coordinated concept for the areas of navigation and collision protection in an automatic feeding system for next-generation dairy cattle. Keywords: AFS, AGV, Automation, Dairy, Feeding, Laser, LiDAR, Radar.

Eight different mixing feeding wagons (MFW) were investigated under identical conditions in preparing total mixed rations (TMR) for three various cattle categories. Investigated were the uniformity of distribution of the feed into the trough, homogeneity of TMR distributed, the machine capacity in feed extracting from storage and loading, TMR mixing and distributing into the trough, fuel consumption and power consumption required. The least uniformity was found for TMR with a high hay proportion (average value of standard deviation 49.9%). Better results were achieved with MFW designed with horizontal mixing augers (average standard deviation 33.7%). MFW with vertical augers distributed feeds at average standard deviation of 61.3%. Standard deviation of the proportion of feed particles on the separator screens which is considered as a measure of TMR homogeneity, was bellow 20% in most cases. This suggests a hint of a very good mixing efficiency of all the MFW followed up. No influence of different designs of the working elements of MFW on TMR homogeneity has been proved. With respect to the machine capacity (output) in preparing and distributing TMR, no large differences between various MFW were found and their output averaged from all measurements varied within the range of 4.79–5.48 t/h. The least average specific consumption of fuel for preparing and distributing TMR was found in the MFW equipped with vertical mixing augers (1.10–1.11 l/t). MFW with one horizontally mounted mixing auger showed a rather higher fuel consumption (1.30–1.43 l/t). The highest fuel consumption was found with MFW equipped with two parallely mounted mixing augers (1.59–1.63 l/t).

The early middle Eocene Wagon Bed fruit and seed flora of central Wyoming encompasses nine morphotypes that are assignable to extant genera (Alangium, Aphanathe, Canarium, Carya, Celtis, Iodes, Mastixia, Nyssa, Pleiogynium), four that are assignable to extinct genera in extant families (Chandlera, Menispermaceae; Coryloides, Betulaceae; Pentoperculum, Anacardiaceae; Saxifragispermum, Salicaceae) and one morphotype potentially assignable to an extant family (Pandanaceae). At least 11 morphotypes remain unidentified due to incomplete characters, although some exhibit features suggestive, but not definitive, of extant families (e.g., Euphorbiaceae, Lauraceae, Nymphaeaceae, Rosaceae). Individual taxa exhibit paleobiogeographic links with the Eocene floras of the west coast of North America, as well as with those of the Eocene of Europe. Together with previously described pollen and woods, these fruits and seeds indicate a mixed evergreen and deciduous forest, existing under moist circumstances, possessing primary taxonomic affinities with extant paratropical taxa of the Old World.

The need to reduce labour demand and the increasing size of herds have led - in the last years - to develop specific automated solutions for feeding animals in dairy farms. Currently there are more than 1250 automatic feeding systems (AFS) used worldwide, but there is a lack of information about both their energy requirements and management costs. The primary aim of the present study was to measure the electric energy consumption of an AFS installed in a dairy farm of Northern Italy under practical conditions. The secondary aim was to calculate, using the classic ASABE approach, the costs for preparing and distributing a total mixed ration (TMR) with the same AFS in comparison with the conventional feeding system (CFS) (tractor + TMR wagon) previously adopted by the farm. The average energy consumption of AFS over the experimental period (two months) was 40.2±2.3 kWh per day, 2.11±0.07 kWh per ton of TMR distributed and 29.6 kWh ∙ cow–1 per year. Energy consumptions and labour were reduced respectively of 97% and 79% passing from a CFS (tractor + TMR wagon) to an AFS, contributing to reduce the daily cost for feeding TMR up to 33%. These results highlighting that AFS can represent an interesting option to improve competitiveness of dairy farms.

The study was carried out to determine the effect of road transportation on some blood and physioclinical indices in West African Dwarf (WAD) goats. Nineteen (19) WAD goats aged between 6 and 8 months weighing between 4.16Kg and 5.90Kg were transported in a wagon for 3 hours 18 minutes. Collection of data on rectal temperature (RT) and heart rate (HR), and blood sampling were carried out just before loading the animals into the wagon and repeated immediately on arrival at the destination. The blood samples were analyzed for packed cell volume (PCV), haemoglobin concentration (HB), red blood cell (RBC), white blood cell (WBC), neutrophil (NEU), lymphocyte (LYM), eosinophil (EOS), corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (MCHC), mean corpuscular haemoglobin (MCH) and mean corpuscular volume (MCV). Serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP), aminotransferase (AST) and alanine transaminase (ALT) concentrations were also determined. Except the reduced (P<0.05) haemoglobin (Hb) after transportation, the results showed that haematological parameters and pulse rate were comparable before departure and on arrival(P>0.05). Rectal temperature was however slightly higher(P<0.05) on arrival compared to departure in mixed sex and male goats. Serum AST, ALT and ALP were higher (P<0.05) before transportation compared to the values obtained on arrival. The findings showed no remarkable influence of transport by road on the haematological parameters and pulse rate of WAD goats except reduced HB, serum AST, ALT and ALP and increasedrectal temperature observed after transportation.

This paper succeeded in utilizing cellular automata (CA) model to simulate the process of the train operation under the four-aspect color light system and getting the nonperiodic diagram of the mixed passenger and freight tracks. Generally speaking, the concerned models could simulate well the situation of wagon in preventing trains from colliding when parking and restarting and of the real-time changes the situation of train speeds and displacement and get hold of the current train states in their departures and arrivals. Finally the model gets the train diagram that simulates the train operation in different ratios of the van and analyzes some parameter characters in the process of train running, such as time, speed, through capacity, interval departing time, and departing numbers.

This study attempts at investigating students’ expletive motives revealing at their experiential life. 177 students majoring in English, Javanese, and Indonesian participated in this study. Data were collected from closed and opened questionnaires focusing on self-rated perception of Scherer and Sagarin’s (2006) ten swearing motives and Nicolau and Sukamto’s (2013) male and female attitudes toward expletive. Analyses used the descriptive and non-parametric statistics. Significant differences among four swearing motives were not found. But, the motive of acting cool indicated a significant difference (p=.000). The negative Z value (Z=-1.910) for anger expression, (Z=-.875) for peer pressure, (Z=-1.567) for tensions and frustrations relief, (Z=-3.607) for part of acting cool, and (Z=-.225) for society acceptance. The findings also indicated 10.2% females and .7% males confirmed bajingan as a wagon driver, whereas 70% females and 25% males stated it as an expletive. Males showed a predominant expletive more than females toward male and mixed gender. TV program was determined as the mostly influenced media. This expletive deals with intra-and inter-individual contexts deducing positive or negative reactions.

In view of the problem that special gondola cars are generally insufficient for the actual transportation of coke, and in order to improve the transportation efficiency and reduce the transportation cost, the 80 t depressed-center gondola car for coke transportation is designed by the anti-fatigue design method in this paper. The car body with a supporting bar and the car body without a supporting bar are simulated and analyzed by the finite element method; the results show that there are stress mutations at the transition area of the two key welds, especially at the 110 mm of weld 1. The fatigue lives of the two car body schemes are evaluated by Miner linear cumulative damage theory, spectrum and S-N curve in AAR standard, and load spectrum of the Daqin line and S-N curve in BSI standard. The results show that the 80 t depressed-center gondola car body with a supporting bar is the best scheme. In addition, the fatigue damage results show that the vertical load spectrum of AAR is worse than that of the Daqin line, and the longitudinal load spectrum of the Daqin line is worse than that of AAR. This conclusion will provide a basis for an anti-fatigue design of heavy haul wagon bodies or bogies.

Abstract To assess the effect of physically effective fiber (peNDF) on ruminal pH, 8 Simmental heifers with 258±5.7kg BW were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 treatments in a replicated 4x4 Latin square design. Diets were formulated with an 83 to 17 concentrate to straw ratio, and offered ad libitum as total mixed ration. Barley straw was chopped with a feeder wagon, and then processed either by: a) sifting with the 3-screen Penn State Particle Separator to obtain straw particle size greater than 4 mm, or b) grinding in a hammer mill through a 2-mm screen to obtain straw particle size lesser than 4 mm. Treatments after mixing the processed straws to obtain different peNDF proportions were: 5%, 7%, 9%, and 11%. Concentrate was ground through a 3-mm screen and manually mixed with the straw. The study was performed in 4 3-wk periods: 2-wk diet adaptation and 1-wk sampling. A ruminal bolus (smaXtec, Graz, Austria) was orally inserted in each heifer to measure ruminal pH every 10 min. Dry matter intake was individually measured. Data were analyzed using the mixed procedure of SAS. No significant effects were found in average and minimum pH (6.66 and 5.87 on average, respectively). Time under pH lesser than 5.8 was significantly longer (P &lt; 0.01) in 5% (134 min/d) than 7%, 9% and 11% (63 min/d on average). Time under pH lesser than 5.6 tended to be longer (P = 0.074) in 5% (65 min/d), and shorter in 9% and 11% (25 min/d on average). Time under pH lesser than 5.5 was unaffected by treatment (23 min/d on average). Intake of DM was greater (P &lt; 0.001) in 5% and 7% than 9% and 11%. These results suggest that the risk of subclinical acidosis decreases from 7 to 11% of peNDF, but DMI also decreases in 9% and 11%.

This study aims to identify reduction and change in students’ misconceptions about sound waves after using sound wave in computer simulation (SWiCS). This research is an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. The participants are 25 students from 11 grade [11 lanang (males) and 14 wadon (females)] with purposive sampling from one school in Karangkobar, Banjarnegara, Central Java. A multi-tiered instrument was used consisting of 20 questions. The reduction of students’ misconceptions was analysed using percentages with three categories, namely sloping, currently, and steep. While the changes by codification, which are categorised as good change (GC), bad change (BC), and no change (NC), and other distributions were analysed using Rasch analysis. The average students’ misconceptions are reduced by 88% (steep). Meanwhile, the changes in misconceptions moved towards GC (56%), BC (32%), and NC (12%). The SWiCS can decrease students’ misconceptions on the sound waves and change conceptions for the better. Keywords: Sound waves in computer simulation (SWiCS); misconception; reduction and changes

Shunting yards are one of the main areas impacting the reliability of rail freight networks, and delayed departures from shunting yards can further also affect the punctuality of mixed-traffic networks. Methods for automatic detection of departures, which are likely to be delayed, can therefore contribute towards increasing the reliability and punctuality of both freight and passenger services. In this paper, we compare the performance of tree-based methods (decision trees and random forests), which have been highly successful in a wide range of generic applications, in classifying the status of (delayed, early, and on-time) departing trains from shunting yards, focusing on the delayed departures as the minority class. We use a total number of 6,243 train connections (representing over 21,000 individual wagon connections) for a one-month period from the Hallsberg yard in Sweden, which is the largest shunting yard in Scandinavia. Considering our dataset, our results show a slight difference between the application of decision trees and random forests in detecting delayed departures as the minority class. To remedy this, enhanced sampling for minority classes is applied by the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) to improve detecting and assigning delayed departures. Applying SMOTE improved the sensitivity, precision, and F-measure of delayed departures by 20% for decision trees and by 30% for random forests. Overall, random forests show a relative better performance in detecting all three departure classes before and after applying SMOTE. Although the preliminary results presented in this paper are encouraging, future studies are needed to investigate the computational performance of tree-based algorithms using larger datasets and considering additional predictors.

Purpose: The aim of the proposed research is to create a calculation model of surface fatigue crack growth at the axle of railway wheelset working under operational loads. Design/methodology/approach: The energy approach of the fracture mechanics was used to formulate the calculation model of fatigue crack propagation at the wheelset axle surface. The method of least squares was used to determine the investigated material mechanical constants that the kinetic equations of the calculation model contain. The system of differential equations of crack growth kinetics was solved numerically using the Runge-Kutta method. Findings: On the basis of the energy approach of the fracture mechanics the calculation model of fatigue macrocrack growth in three-dimensional elastic-plastic body in case of a mixed-mode I+II+III macromechanism of fracture has been built. On the basis of the created calculation model, the kinetics of the growth of fatigue cracks was investigated both in the middle part of the wheelset axle and in the axle journal. Research limitations/implications: The results obtained on laboratory specimens should be tested during a real railway wheelset axle investigation. Practical implications: The created calculation model can be used in practice to formulate method of residual lifetime estimation of railway wheelset axle. Originality/value: It was shown, that surface crack kinetics depends not only on the crack initial area but also significantly depends on the crack edge geometry and comparatively small crack-like defects at the wheelset axle surface can reach critical sizes in comparatively short run. It has been found that mechanical shear stresses caused by the weight of the loaded railway wagon in the cross section of the wheelset axle journal can significantly accelerate the growth of the transverse fatigue crack at the axle surface, reducing the period of crack subcritical growth by about 20%.

When developing potash deposits, an important point is to preserve the continuity of the water-proof layer for ensuring prevention of the groundwater penetration into the mine space. For this purpose, the development of the Verkhnekamskoye field is carried out by a chamber development system with the abandonment of chain poles to preserve the waterproof layer. Ore crushing is carried out with the help of high-performance combine systems, at the same time, the ore extraction process is accompanied by emissions of a large amount of dust into the mine atmosphere. The existing mining system assumes the movement of the outgoing flow of polluted air through the entire mine roadway (chamber), from the face to the mouth. In addition, there is a self-propelled carriage in the cell, driven by a miner who is forced to work in a polluted atmosphere. The most efficient method of reducing the air dustiness involves the use of hygroscopic properties of dust, however, the use of moisture in the bottom to reduce the dustiness of the air in potash mines is highly undesirable, since when sylvinite is contacting with water, an aggressive environment is formed that can disable working equipment. With such a system, mining is about 30–45 %, and the ventilation scheme of a dead-end treatment face does not allow to ensure safe working conditions for the workers of the working face, in particular, the driver of a self-propelled wagon. The dust collection system available in the design of the combine system is very inefficient. In this paper, a system of mining is proposed, which includes regular cutting of the chain poles. A solution is considered that allows to reduce the concentration of dust in the atmosphere of the working face by changing movement of the outgoing air flow, as well as to increase the air volume.

Railway track retention standards in Ukraine do not take into account theconstruction of the subrail base, but regulate one for all types maximum dangerous value of the trackwidth, which was changed from 1546 mm to 1548 mm without any justification of scientific researchor explanations of the effects of tolerances the width of the rail track and the wheel track, which ingeneral at that time were not fully investigated but taking into account the emergence anddevelopment of new scientific problems associated with the emergence of intensive lateral wear ofrails and ridges of locomotive and wagon wheels. The deterministic dependences of lateralimpressions of the P65 type rail thread head on the simultaneous influence of vertical and horizontalforces for the newly installed repair profiles of UZ rolling stock on the basis of previously performedexperimental and theoretical studies were investigated. The results allow at this stage of research todetermine and calculate the practical values of the maximum dangerous width of the track, in whichthe subrail base consists of reinforced concrete sleepers and separate rail fasteners, which are usedboth on conventional highways with mixed traffic and on high-speed lines UZ.The article establishes the need to take into account new factors influencing the dangerouswidth of the rail track with intermediate rail fasteners of separate type depending on the load stress of sections and new repair profiles of rolling stock, as well as wear processes of intermediate railfasteners type KБ and its elements on the appearance of elastic backlash in the lateral direction fromthe influence of the guide wheels of the rolling stock. The recommended value of the maximum widthof the rail track for areas where service or emergency braking is applied - 1550 mm, taking intoaccount that the contact of the wheel and the rail is not at a point, but on an ellipse. The establishednorm of the maximum width of a rail track allows to define economic efficiency of introduction in theconditions of operation of a track in curved sections of a track of small radii with limited use of themaximum admissible lateral wear (15 mm) of a head of a rail thread provided that the normal-forcedentry of rolling stock carts.

The article deals with certain medico-legal aspects of trauma in the salon of bus as one of the types of road traffic accidents with a large number of dead and injured. Are shown the typical causes of such incidents and the nature of the victims injury. Was developed and proposed a modern approach to optimization of expert research in case of appearance a large number of victims in the bus. Circumstances of injury in case of personal injury people in the bus are very diverse:− rollover of the bus when transporting a large number of people while driving;− bus falling from height;− a massive collision with a fixed roadside objects; − collision with other vehicles; among the latter is the most fatal bus collision with a moving train.Naturally, in these cases, the massive injuries have affected depends on the intensity of injury to passengers in the bus, and the mechanism of damage is determined by the specific form of an accident involving a bus. In such cases, the experts faced, usually with mechanical trauma inside the cabin, and mixed types of injuries passengers (e.g. in case of fire). For in-car trauma characterized by formation damage from the following mechanisms:− shock bodies on the inner part of the interior (interior);− injuries from the shards of broken glass.Basically, the nature of injury is determined by the structural features of the bus, the presence of foreign objects, the location of the victims. If the vehicle rolls over, the occupants people are numerous additional impact. Formed characteristic for the driver damage to the hands, fractures of the sternum fractures of the hips, legs and feet. For passengers is characteristic fractures of the lower limbs, bruised head wounds, fractures and dislocations of the cervical spine when using the seat belts − stripe-like bruises and abrasions ofthe chest and abdomen, broken ribs, collarbone, sternum, in the projection of the belts. Shards of broken glass caused by the multiple linear abrasions and (or) surface or deep cut wounds mainly in the face and upper extremities. In the case of deformation of the bus body can be compression of the bodies are formed by damage to several areas, primarily the chest, abdomen, extremities, accompanied by multiple bilateral rib fractures, ruptures of internal organs. If in the future there is a fire or explosion of the vehicle, the nature of thedamage detected on the bodies will correspond to the combined injury.In cases of injuries in the bus to work with the bodies of the victims begins at the scene. Thus, the Protocol of inspection of the scene and of the corpse in the first place should reflect the data about the mutual position of bodies and (or) their fragments relative to the vehicle and other parts, the distance between them; the condition of clothing, odors from it, the presence of different overlays, damage; contamination of the skin; localization and nature of the injuries on the bodies, the presence of deformations of its individualparts; the presence of traces of biological origin on the vehicle in comparison with the nature of the deformation (damage) of the body.Be sure to note the results of the inspection of the road where there was a traffic accident, a bus traces of blood, and fragments of various things, etc. Despite the small percentage of bus injured in world General statistics of fatal injuries, it presents certain difficulties in planning, organization, execution and coordination of forensic work on multi-step liquidation of medical consequences of the accident, usually associated with a large number of victims, gross impact of factors affecting on the bodies of the victims, the need to quickly address some specific issues: establishing at autopsy pathological symptoms that indicate the status of the health of drivers in the period priorto the tragic event; the existence of facts pointing to the use of intoxicating and medicinal substances that depress the nervous system and many others), early identification of all victims. According to the results of the analysis made it impossible to offer modern, optimal, evidence-informed, and until only itremains to be reliable in practice the system approach to the organizational model of forensic activities, while ensuring the interests of the investigation of an accident involving a bus and a large number of victims:1. The preliminary stage of organization expert services. It can conditionally enough be divided into 2 phases:− advance (pre-) phase;− the immediate phase.To the basic questions of the early phases include: early development, coordination and approval of the optimal legislative and other regulatory framework; preliminary methodological, administrative and organizational, theoretical-practical, logistical, software and applied training; exercise reasonable estimates of projected short and long term needs and costs with regard to the peculiarities specified by the tragic events; creation, storage, use and replenishment of the trust reserves, logistical and financial resources areinviolable, is intended solely for use in such emergencies. It also includes the creation, maintenance and continuous improvement of a Single centralized situation center on a temporary or permanent basis, with a good system of departmental and interdepartmental cooperation, primarily containing a - operational information-Supervisory and analytical center for the collection, processing, storage, information exchange and joint action with the threat, occurrence and prevention of emergencies with a large number of victims.Immediately with the receipt of the news of the accident involving a bus and a large number of victims for forensic services begin immediate phase, the main elements of which include:− prompt notification and collection of employees and expert institutions;− an emergency conference call to discuss the organizational, theoretical and practical questions and short specialized trainingon occupational safety, including use of personal protective equipment depending on the nature of the accident and actions are potentially dangerous to health and life of employees and expert institutions factors.All plans of measures are necessarily coordinated and agreed with appropriate representatives of structures of fast reaction, especially when conducting urgent investigative actions in the emergency areas, primarily the inspection of the scene. 2. The inspection of the crime scene it is advisable to start with a preliminary review («intelligence»), which finally determined the necessity of application of those or other technical means, and the number of specialists who will participate in the inspection.The static phase of scene examination with the participation of forensic doctors is accompanied by clear mapping; mapping, photo - and video fixing of vehicle, various objects; it is noted the exact relative positions of the bus (its parts) and discovered the corpses, fragments of human remains and other biological material. During dynamic examination of the scene produce a detailed external examination of the human remains, their fragments, biological material, perform primary medical sorting, their careful packaging,clear detailed marking. Then performed the proper loading, transportation and unloading. In case of need in a temporary Deposit of biological material, can be used in railway wagons refrigerators, refrigerated trailers, mobile camera with a refrigeration unit, and in the absence or lack of volume for the total number of remains and the biomaterial deploys heat-resistant boxes, fit the space with the use of outdoor mobile air conditioning systems, large amounts of ice obtained from specialized industrial ice makers, etc., which is especially important for braking processes of rotting corpses, their fragments and biomaterial in the warm season.3. After the initial registration and a secondary sort examine corpses, their fragments and biological material collection for postmortem identification of significant information, determine the cause of death, nature, mechanism and prescription of formation damage and address other special issues. At this stage also produce the identification of fragmented body parts and (or) tissues that or another body. In expert identification work on the fragments of human remains or biological material, preference is given to genetic research providing highly accurate results. Depending on the extent of influence of damaging factors on the bodies of the victims and their degree of preservation, only after the completion of the necessary is judicial-medical research with a full range of fence material for additional research, producing restoration of the exterior, embalming, sanitary and cosmetic processing of human remains and give them to relatives (relatives, authorized representatives, etc.) for burial. 4. Issued the final results of examinations; establishes data that may be useful for later investigative and judicial actions aimed at gathering and verification of evidence in a criminal case.5. The penultimate stage consists of conducting sanitary-and-hygienic, treatment-and-prophylactic, rehabilitation (including a full psychological) of interventions for physical and mental health of employees and expert institutions involved in this work.6. After the conclusion of the criminal proceedings in general, with the official opening of data access, it is advisable to analyze the material, and publish the relevant data in the scientific literature, with the goal of widespread study and use of gained experience.CONCLUSIONS.1. Research platform forensic activities in cases of accidents involving buses and a large number of victims to date have not been developed.2. The effectiveness of forensic medical groups in this situation is in direct proportion to the degree of readiness for quick response and timely quality completion of tasks.3. Based on this, very urgent is the development of modern optimal evidence-based systemic approach to the organizational model of forensic activities in the presence of a large number of injured persons in the bus; the solution to this problem and sent the above recommendations.4. The recommendations, in principle, can be applied not only in cases of injuries in the bus, but also to similar situations in which there is a massive injury and loss of life.5. It is necessary to continue scientific and practical research aimed at improving this algorithm works experts.

В настоящее время перспективной технологией для кормления КРС является использование автоматических систем кормления (АСК), функцию раздачи кормосмесей в которых выполняют автоматические кормовые вагоны (кормовагоны), преимущественно подвесного типа. Цель исследования разработка методики определения конструктивнотехнологических параметров кормового вагона рассмотренной конструкции. В работе проведен обзор существующих решений у 17 компаний, занимающихся производством АСК. В основном данные технологии распространены в Германии, Австрии, Нидерландах и странах Скандинавии. На основании данного обзора выделены основные признаки, по которым различаются предлагаемые на рынке кормовагоны. Установлено, что наиболее распространенной технологией является использование подвесных кормовагонов, в состав конструкции которых входят продольный и поперечный транспортеры и битерное устройство, а загрузка готовых кормосмесей осуществляется из стационарного смесителя. В работе схематично представлена конструкция кормовагона, взятая за основу при расчетах. Описаны существующие технологии нормирования кормосмесей животным по массе (кг/гол), а также по объему (м3/гол). Приведены примеры их реализации, и дано описание принципа работы систем, позволяющих осуществлять раздачу с учетом реальных потребностей животных и фактического наличия кормосмесей на кормовом столе. Получены формулы, позволяющие определять скорость движения продольного транспортера для каждой из рассмотренных технологий нормирования, и формула для согласования этой скорости со скоростью движения поперечного (выгрузного) транспортера. Детально рассмотрен процесс формирования слоя кормосмеси на выгрузном транспортере. Использование предложенной методики позволяет рассчитать скорости продольного и поперечного транспортеров при проектировании автоматических кормовых вагонов предложенной конструкции.Currently, a promising technology for feeding cattle is the use of automatic feeding systems (AFS), the function of distribution of TMR in which automatic feed wagons (feed wagons), mainly of a suspended type, perform. The purpose of the study is the development of methods for determining the constructive and technological parameters of the feed wagon of the considered structure. The paper reviewed existing solutions from 17 companies engaged in the production of AFS. Basically, these technologies are common in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. Based on this review, the main features that distinguish the feed wagons on the market are highlighted. It has been established that the most common technology is the use of suspended feed wagons, whose design includes longitudinal and transverse conveyors and a beater device, and loading of finished feed mixtures is carried out from a stationary TMR mixer. A schematic representation of the design of the feed wagon, taken as the basis for the calculations, is presented. The existing technologies for rationing TMR to animals by weight (kg / cow), as well as by volume (m3 / cow) are described. Examples of their implementation are given, and a description is given of the principle of operation of the systems allowing distribution to be carried out taking into account the real needs of animals and the actual presence of TMR on the feeding table. Formulas have been obtained that allow determining the speed of movement of the longitudinal conveyor for each of the considered rationing technologies, and the formula for relating this speed to the speed of movement of the transverse (unloading) conveyor. The process of formation of the TMR layer on the transverse conveyor is considered in detail. Using the proposed method allows to calculate the speed of the longitudinal and transverse conveyors when the feed wagons of the proposed structure are designed.

Mixed freight trains have more diversified vehicle characteristics and train combination modes than unified freight trains, so it is more difficult for mixed freight trains to predict the accident caused by longitudinal impulse. At present, train dynamics theories and numerical simulation methods have been increasingly used to reduce longitudinal train impulse and decrease freight wagon instability. According to these research experiences, this paper focuses on the marshalling modes of mixed freight trains and their effects on the longitudinal in-rain forces. For this purpose, an advanced simulation model for mixed freight trains was developed and several typical mixed marshalling modes were designed and simulated. The results indicate that, for the mixed train including empty and loaded wagons, empty wagons should be arranged at the tail of the train and should avoid being marshalled together. For the mixed train including marshalled wagons with various actual live loads or nominal axle loads, heavier wagons should be centrally arranged in the front part of the train, and meanwhile marshalled wagons should avoid being sorted by weight in the concave and ascending distribution mode. For the mixed train including marshalled wagons with various body types, container flat wagons and oil tank wagons should be arranged as much as possible in the front of the other wagons.

Weather extremes in parts of Europe have led to a renewed search for alternative feeds for ruminants. Cereal straw presents one source of fibre, which is hard to digest due to its lignin-carbohydrate complexes. Chemical and biological treatments have been investigated to improve digestibility. Here, the applicability of alkaline treatments for farming conditions under EU legislation and their efficacy were checked. Thus, we tested caustic soda (60, 120 g kg-1straw) and urea (15, 30, 45, 60 g kg-1 straw without and with urease addition) applications both at laboratory scale and using a mixer-wagon. The nutritive value was evaluated analyzing chemical parameters including fibre components and estimating in vitro digestibility. The in vitro digestibility indicated by gas production, enzymatically soluble substrate and neutral detergent fibre digestibility (30h) was highest for the NaOH treatments, which did not differ by dose. Remoistening the straw to 600 g DM kg-1 was a precondition for the effectiveness of both treatments. Urease addition enhanced the intended ammonification when urea was applied at ≥ 30 g kg-1. An ambient temperature for urea treatment ≥ 25 °C was necessary and had to be maintained for at least 14 d post treatment. The determination of crude ash in NaOH treated feeds by the standard procedure and time overestimated the mineral fraction and had to be modified. This systematic approach provides guidance for feasible straw treatments for EU farmers. However, trials for feed acceptance and in vivo digestibility are needed to demonstrate the real effect in animals.

Presentación“Mezcla y Uso” plantea la generación de usos mixtos comerciales de carácter barrial. El proyecto se ubica en la cuadra norte, adyacente a la estación del Pacífico y al oeste del parque del barrio Pacífico de ciudad de San Jose´. La utilización literal de vagones apela al imaginario del sitio y, a raíz de su configuración longitudinal, se comienza a formular un proyecto en función de los vanos que se generan entre vagones llenos y vacíos (solamente estructura del vagón). Presentation“Mix and Use” promotes the generation of commercial mixed-use with neighborhood character. The project is located in the adjacent north block of the Pacific Train Station and at the west of the Pacific neighborhood Park in the center of San José. The literal use of train cars appeals to the collective imaginary of the site and, following its longitudinal configuration, it begins to formulate a project based on the openings that are generated between full and empty wagons (only wagon structure).

During the last decades, many dairy farmers have actively advanced their farms toward automation. Automatic concentrate dispensers and automatic milking systems have been utilised for years, and several manufacturers have introduced automatic feeding systems (AFS). AFSs allow for the increase in frequency of feed distribution with significant advantages in terms of health and production. Furthermore, they provide a reduction of man labour related to preparation of feed, distribution, and propelling the ration closer to the feeding rack. The present research was focused on the monitoring of a dairy farm, located in the Veneto region of Italy, during the transition from a conventional feeding system (CFS), based on a tractor operated mixing wagon, to an automatic system equipped with stationary feeding hoppers, mixing unit, and distribution wagon operating on rail. The article reports a comparative analysis of the structural modifications required for the adoption of AFS, including an analysis of the AFS/CFS systems based on their functionality, energy, and man labour requirements. In the case study, AFS represented an affordable way to reduce covered area of the housings, as a result of the reduction in width of foraging lane and the reduction of manger front length. In addition, AFS demonstrated a reduction in labour requirements and improvement of quality and consistency of work when feeding total mixed ration. Finally, the research was addressed to study dairy cow behaviour. A method for monitoring the feeding, resting, and standing indexes was applied to the CFS farm. As a preliminary result of this activity, a positive correlation between cow resting activity and milk production was discovered.

The South African rail industry is seeking a critical measure to monitor and save energy usage in the freight rail sector. The rail industry is experiencing increasing operational costs and high energy consuming driving records along various coal lines. Eco-driving is a modern and efficient way of driving that emphasizes fuel efficiency, speed, and safety. This study provides an algorithm to find the optimal trajectory for a freight train hauling a load over a specific distance. Optimized speed profile is composed of optimal acceleration, coasting, and deceleration. The Freight Eco-Driving Energy Optimizer (FEDEO) solution is not yet applied to freight trains globally, especially in Africa. In this study, the eco-driving strategy of a freight train is formulated as an optimization problem, whose objective function is the energy cost. The decision variables are the tractive and braking effort notches, and the speed, acceleration and distance limits are formulated as constraints. The formulated eco-driving problem is solved by Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) from the Opti Solver toolbox. The FEDEO algorithm is applied to a train consisting of eight 19E locomotives with two-hundred CCR-9 wagons, over a distance of 90.64 km. The results show up to 34.76% reduction in energy costs.

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.